[The air in the dim music-room corridor turned heavy, thick enough that the killing intent pressing down on the place almost had a taste.]

[The middle-aged man and the Curse User with the paper bag over his head both noticed the black-and-white plush toy that had slipped from Riko’s arms. For a split second, surprise crossed their faces. Then experience took over. That faint but steady current of Cursed Energy was too obvious to miss. This harmless-looking stuffed panda was a Cursed Corpse, and not some cheap toy either.]

[The discovery did not scare them. If anything, it made both men smirk.]

[In their eyes, it was just a backup measure left behind by the Jujutsu Sorcerers guarding the Star Plasma Vessel. A little insurance policy for when the real guards were not around. Annoying, maybe. Dangerous? Hardly.]

[No proper sorcerer had shown up. And these two had survived in the black market for years, long enough to think very highly of themselves. Neither one believed he was the sort of third-rate trash who would lose to a security puppet with button eyes.]

[Actually, they were thrilled. Compared to the tens of millions, maybe even hundreds of millions, waiting for them once Riko Amanai died, the final thing in their way was a stuffed animal with cotton teeth. What was there to complain about? This was practically money dropped from the sky.]

[Greed had already gotten into their heads. Before the girl was even dead, both men were thinking about what came after. How would they move the body? How would they prove the kill and collect the bounty? This was a school, after all. Dragging a corpse past a bunch of students might be more troublesome than killing her.]

[Their eyes met across the space where Riko stood. It was only for a moment, but that was enough. In each other’s bloodshot gaze, they saw the same thing, a refusal to share. Unlike the four idiots at the hotel, neither man had any cute little fantasy about splitting the reward.]

[First one to kill her got paid.]

[Both moved at once. Two hungry predators closing in from opposite sides.]

[The middle-aged man was the craftier one. As he sprinted, his fingers snapped through hand signs.]

[The two grotesque Cursed Spirits crouched near his feet, the ones with human hands for lower bodies and swollen lumps of flesh for heads, puffed out their foul cheeks like toads.]

[They split apart. One aimed at the paper-bag brute charging from the other side. The other locked onto Panda on the floor, both ready to spit out blasts of corrosive Cursed Energy.]

[The man himself intended to use the mess as cover, slip through, reach Riko, and snap that thin little neck with his bare hands.]

[Riko could not make a sound.]

[She had no training. Her eyes could not keep up with movement that fast. The whole corridor blurred into afterimages and hot, rotten wind rolling off the Cursed Spirits.]

[Through the panic, her tear-clouded gaze dropped to the small figure at her feet. The stuffed panda. The one that had spoken to her.]

[Here, in a place where no scream would reach anyone in time, that toy was the only thing she had left. The lifeline given to her by the strongest and strangest person she had ever met.]

[Time seemed to stretch until it nearly snapped.]

[What came back to her was not the blood and slaughter from the hotel corridor.]

[It was the moment he had placed the toy in her hands. His calm, warm voice...]

["If you’re ever so scared you can’t stand it, hold onto him. He’ll protect you."]

[The boy with gentle eyes had said it so plainly, so certainly, and pressed the panda into her hands.]

[Now death was right in front of her, and the brittle shell Riko had built around herself finally broke.]

[The proud composure from the hotel room was gone. The girl who had declared she would merge with Master Tengen, who had talked about dying with dignity as the Star Plasma Vessel, was nowhere to be found. That confidence had been crushed into dust.]

[All she could think about were ordinary things. The life she wanted and would never get back. The youth she had not lived. The food she had not eaten enough of. Misato Kuroi, always beside her, the person she treasured more than anyone.]

[Her whole body shook. Tears poured down her face, messy and unstoppable.]

[Only now, with death already reaching for her, did she finally hear the real voice buried at the bottom of her heart.]

[She did not want to die. She did not want to die in some dark hallway for no reason at all.]

["Help me...!"]

[Panda did not answer with words.]

[His round little body moved instead.]

[His legs bent low. His center of gravity dropped with clean, impossible precision.]

[His right forepaw crossed toward his left side, and gripped an invisible hilt. The stance was textbook. No, better than textbook. It was the posture of someone who had repeated the motion until it lived in their bones.]

[New Shadow Style: Simple Domain: Evening Moon.]

[A thin hum passed through the air, so high it was almost impossible to hear.]

[With Panda’s tiny body as the center, pale crescent light bloomed outward in a ring.]

[The Simple Domain spread brutally fast. In less than a millisecond it swallowed the whole corridor, the middle-aged man, the paper-bag brute, and even the two grotesque Cursed Spirits further back with their cheeks still swollen and ready to fire. Every one of them was dragged into the same killing field.]

[The two Curse Users were experienced enough to recognize it the instant their feet crossed the boundary. New Shadow Style. Simple Domain.]

[But recognition only made their disbelief worse. They had seen plenty of strange things, sure, but this? A Cursed Corpse, a puppet that should not even have a proper will of its own, taking a correct stance and deploying a technique that demanded this level of Cursed Energy control and martial skill? Ridiculous. Completely ridiculous.]

[Their minds, still racing with their bodies, grabbed the most reasonable answer they could find. The puppeteer had to be nearby. Some hidden sorcerer was using the stuffed panda as a relay, projecting the Simple Domain through it from cover.]

[So that was the trick. That was why they dared leave Riko Amanai alone. She was bait. Draw them in, trap them with the Domain, then step out and finish the job.]

[Why were they so sure? Simple. In their heads, there was no world where a half-meter-tall plush toy could do anything besides act as a signal tower. What was it supposed to do, fight them? With those stubby arms that barely reached past its own belly? Please.]

[They did not see Panda’s drawn-sword stance as a threat. They treated it as a binding condition for the remote Domain. Nothing more.]

[Behind the paper bag, the big man gave a mocking snort. His fist kept driving forward.]

[In a sense, they were not completely wrong. Panda had taken a drawing stance.]

[But what he was about to draw had never been a sword.]

[Inside the absolute range of New Shadow Style: Simple Domain, time seemed to stop.]

["Click."]

[A sharp metallic sound rang out from Panda’s right palm.]

[A chain burst from it.]

[Cold, lethal links flashed in the dim corridor, shooting out of his furry palm. Fast did not even begin to cover it.]

[The Chain of a Thousand Miles. The special grade cursed tool you had taken from Toji Fushiguro, hidden here as part of a plan prepared long before this moment.]

[This was the real blade you had left with Panda. A weapon that did not care about common sense or the usual limits of physics.]

[You had used the Chain’s absurd property to its fullest. As long as one end remained unobserved, it could ignore physical law, shrinking into something almost weightless and folding away like infinite storage. You had buried that hidden end deep inside Panda’s core and anchored it there.]

[And because the chain could extend endlessly as long as its tip stayed unseen, you had turned an indestructible special grade cursed tool into a seamless extension of Panda’s arm.]

[It was the perfect fix. Panda’s biggest weakness in this miniature form was his reach, or rather, the embarrassing lack of it. The chain solved that in the most unreasonable way possible, giving him a range of destruction that had no business belonging to a stuffed animal.]

[The conditions for New Shadow Style: Simple Domain: Evening Moon were complete.]

["CLANG!!!"]

[Panda’s fuzzy arm snapped forward. The Chain of a Thousand Miles screamed out like a long blade, and a force strong enough to split stone tore through the corridor.]

[The strike broke the sound barrier. Air shrieked apart as a flashing afterimage ripped through the hall.]

[The blade made from a special grade cursed tool swept horizontally in one clean arc. In that single instant, it caught the middle-aged man, the paper-bag Curse User, and both grotesque Cursed Spirits mid-charge, cutting all four through the waist.]

[No pause. No struggle. No clever last-second trick.]

[Between one blink and the next, the middle-aged man’s smug face and the paper bag man’s thick torso were sliced into neat sections.]

[The two Cursed Spirits did not even get to cry out. The chain smashed through their swollen heads on contact, and their bodies dissolved into a spray of Cursed Energy residue.]

[The attack still was not finished. To cover such a wide arc, the endlessly extending chain carried its momentum onward, past flesh and bone, and slammed into the concrete exterior wall separating the corridor from the schoolyard.]

["BOOM!!!"]

[The reinforced wall crumbled like wet clay. The chain tore a gaping hole straight through it, and harsh sunlight flooded the corridor.]

[No human scream remained in the air.]

[Death had arrived too fast for that. There was only the wet slap of organs hitting the floor, hot blood splashing across the tiles like sudden rain, and the thunderous collapse of concrete filling everything with choking dust.]

[In the middle of the carnage, amid rubble and ruin that looked like a battlefield had briefly visited a school hallway, Panda stood firm.]

[With an almost human flick of his wrist, he cracked the Chain of a Thousand Miles like a whip. Centrifugal force stripped every drop of blood from the links, leaving a stark red line across the broken wall.]

[Then the chain rattled softly and retracted into his palm, as if none of it had happened.]

[Panda turned his round black-and-white head.]

[Behind him, Riko Amanai sat collapsed on the floor. Tears still clung to her cheeks, but she had gone utterly still, stunned silent by the impossible violence she had just witnessed.]

[Panda looked at her and smiled. Somehow, even with that rough voice, the smile felt simple and warm.]

["It’s okay. You don’t have to be scared. I’ll protect you."]